The Lowland Reel

so it may be of interest to consider it here; it certainly reveals the oddities of classification of the 'highland/lowland' divide; whereas our first tune, 'Lowland Amusement' appears only in collections of 'highland bagpipe' music, this one, despite its title, first appears in lowland, indeed, border, sources. Mind you, when you look at the contents of these early to mid-19th century highland collections, they contain at many tunes that we can identify as 'lowland' in origin. So I'm going to start with Wm. Dixon's Highland Laddie [the Dixon manuscript date from 1733, for those who have yet to encounter it. The edition published by Matt Seattle is available from the LBPS shop; Matt has asked that it not be reproduced here.]

Again, it's a question of getting those quaver passages in the right place; a tune as sparse as this really shows up when they're wrong. At first I thought it was just strain 4 but the more attention I paid to that the more I realised that it applies to all the strains. Even those that have crotchets, like 1 & 3, still insist on having their 'pick-up' quavers absolutely right. here's the first full attempt; I'm concentrating here on those quavers, and so some other things get neglected, such as wilfull decisions about the repetaed notes in the tags; some are nearer to an intention than others So I think I'll try and record just few strains - I may even upload the ones where I get it wring, just to make the point ... Meanwhile, here's my current version .